Repulsion

Synopsis

The nightmare world of a virgin's dreams becomes the screen's shocking reality!

In Roman Polanski's first English-language film, beautiful young manicurist Carole suffers from androphobia (the pathological fear of interaction with men). When her sister and roommate, Helen, leaves their London flat to go on an Italian holiday with her married boyfriend, Carole withdraws into her apartment. She begins to experience frightful hallucinations, her fear gradually mutating into madness.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Just as bad is the failure to observe. They are failures with which we all are overly familiar, whether we know it or not. Lost in a haze of tact and duplicity and feigned invulnerability and self-loathing, we keep what we think to ourselves. A wise and proper move at times; a misleading and destructive bit of stonewalling at others. And as we’re being selectively tight-lipped, we turn inward to consider what we should not consider sharing. Too focused on our navels to notice others' miscommunication and carefully chosen silence, to truly read between the lines and see them and their concerns.…

There is something uniquely intriguing about watching a talented filmmaker trying to find his footing in one of his first films, especially in a setting where he is in total control, namely the mind of his protagonist.

To me true horror comes in the shape of losing control. This film is about that and it is unrelenting in the terror that Catherine Deneuve suffers through. She is slowly losing her mind and that gradual process is depicted beautifully.

Polanski tenaciously tightens the screws and always keeps you as a viewer unaware when he is going to make a transition from the real world to Deneuve's delusions. These transitions are so smooth that they have a very unsettling effect. What struck…

Roman Polanski's English-language debut is not only a film that goes down rather easily as one of his very best films, but also one of the greatest horror films to ever grace the screen. This is a film that alienates the senses much to the point that we end up getting caught so out of nowhere, from how Polanski cleverly builds up tension from first scene to last or how he also forms one of the most haunting of all descents into insanity to have been captured on film. Whatever words one chooses to throw at Repulsion, a certain term that comes to mind when I wish to talk about my first experience - traumatizing. Polanski's first venture into horror…

What Roman Polanski and his crew do with sound here is just incredible. Obviously much of the praise for Repulsion’s intensely claustrophobic and at times truly horrifying atmosphere is due to the fidgety discomfort of Catherine Deneuve’s performance and the dark distortions of Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography, but what I couldn’t get over from the start of the movie to the end was the way it used sound to instill a haunting disquiet—and they way it pulls all the sound out of particularly horrifying scenes. Prolonged silence. A bell tolls too many times. Water drips incessantly from an unseen faucet. A woman’s frightened voice pierces through closed windows and doors, screaming from oblivion, voicing the…

As a child the one place you should be safe more than any other is your home. When that citadel of childhood innocence is beseiged and torn asunder by a sexual predator, where then can you find refuge other than through dissociation. Suffering and shame become so deeply associated with the body that the mind detaches itself from its physical embodiment, burying itself in an isolated bubble only tenuously thethered back to the tangible world.

In Repulsion, Catherine Deneuve perfectly renders such a state with genuine pathos. Her character Carol's disturbing childhood trauma unleashes its devestating consequences with a tragic and harrowing force. Denueve keeps one weary eye…

How does one portray the psychological manifestation of dementia cinematically with minimal funds and vast imagination? Well if you can achieve even half of what Roman Polanski does with his sophomore film, then you would be on the right track. With a slow-burn European sensibility, building atmosphere and tension before showing you it's hand, Repulsion has gone onto to be revered with the greats, despite Polanski's ambivalence towards the film: “Repulsion is the shoddiest—technically well below the standard I try to achieve.”, but this sounds like a man who remembers only the struggle to fight for funds to achieve his ultimate goal.

Catherine Deneuve's social anxiety and sexual repression are twin powder kegs, lit by the insistent poking and prodding of suitors and coworkers unable (or unwilling) to understand her, before detonating in acts of panicked violence as the film spirals into a radical, hallucinatory nightmare. Hell hath no fury like a temperament unheeded.

See the unseen tethered soul. Tell the story of one wounded while their past circumstance is untold. These gaps- that in watching seem to be a clear element of the picture- were, for me, the most spine-tingling element of Carol's lonely tale.

It was really weird to coincidentally watch this back-to-back with McCabe & Mrs. Miller as that ended with a shot zooming into an eyeball and this movie opens with a close up of an eye-ball. The movie itself I don't know how I feel about, it's well made and has a fair amount of cool shots but overall I didn't love it.

Repulsion, the first entry into Polanski's apartment trilogy, is one that chronicles a young woman, Carol, as she slips into a fractured mental state over the course of her sister's vacation.

Set primarily in the apartment, this nightmarish, fever-fueled horror film is a fantastic representation of how important mise-en-scène and sound design is to the genre. Designs like the overbearing kitchen or claustrophobic hallway, which is the only way to the bathroom or Carol's sister's bedroom (both of which serve as strong thematic elements throughout the film's entirety), heavily play on Carol's sanity and harbor her fear as she hallucinates about intruders raping and groping her incessantly.